Skill Matching

All schools are now required to teach reading through a
combination of synthetic phonics and high frequency words.
Teachers have invariably avoided using ‘real books’ (i.e. books
that are not drawn from reading schemes) to teach reading
because they are not seen to be sufficiently phonically regular or
contain many high frequency words and so cannot give children
the practice they require in applying their phonics and sight
word reading skills to text.

Skill matching is an innovative and exciting way of overcoming
this potential disadvantage of using real books when teaching
reading. We have worked closely with University based computer
scientists to develop ground-breaking new technology that has
enabled us to analyse every word in the 500 books to identify all
the phonic and sight word reading skills required to read each
book. This allows us to identify the books with the most frequent
occurrences of any phonic skill being taught through any
synthetic phonic programme. This will allow children to practise
their phonic decoding skills through stories that stimulate and
delight, which will in turn, help to ensure that their phonic
knowledge can be successfully generalised. Skill matching allows
us to do exactly the same for high frequency words and to
provide details of which books have the most frequent
occurrences of any given word so that children can gain
invaluable experience of reading words in a broad context and
generalise their sight word reading skills.